Expressing conditionality in Mandarin Chinese: A comparative study of 'ruguo' and 'zhiyao'

Abstract

After a broad overview of Mandarin Chinese conditionality marking, this paper presents a corpus-based analysis of two conditional connectives, rúguǒ and zhǐyào (both translatable as ‘if’), from a syntactic and a cognitive perspective. We examine their use in narrative and informative texts along four parameters: clause order, position of the connective within the clause, domain, and counterfactuality. For all parameters, the two connectives displayed robust profiles across genres. Both connectives preferred an antecedent-consequent clause order. They displayed flexibility in their position, behaving like adverbs, with rúguǒ showing a stronger preference for the pre-subject position than zhǐyào.In terms of domains, zhǐyào has a stronger preference for content conditionals than rúguǒ, which is also frequently used in the epistemic domain. In our data, only rúguǒ was used meta-metaphorically and in counterfactuals. We argue that both connectives can be translated with ‘if’, but zhǐyào alsomatches ‘so/as long as’.